Unchain the door, the younger cop said. We have a few questions to ask you.
She took two steps back to give them another view, pirouetting slightly as more light came through and revealed the lines of her body — she could feel it, the cheap silk that had been rubbing against her skin for a week now, beneath her jeans and T-shirts.
We’re not going to bring you in or nothing, the young cop said. His voice passed through his nasal passages, barely making it, and came out squeaking like the air through a balloon and then seemed to loosen as it passed his glossy wet lips. While he waited for her to answer she could hear the calls of sparrows in the fields on the other side of the road and the sound of sunrise striking the bare bones of Big Rapids. The older cop brought himself around and in front of the young one and spoke with a husky voice, his hand down low near his gun.
Now, please open up, he said.
Then the door opened with the blast of a well-placed kick, landing hard against Rake, who was up and around it anyway, his gun aimed high to catch them in the face, and the blast of buckshot fanned against the cheap walls with a muted thump, turning them both into a fury of blood and gore that extinguished the sight of her forever: the sight of her standing there was the last they saw before the blast erased all. One for you, and one for you, Rake said.
A high shrieking in her ears that she recognized from other times, a sense of airlessness as if she’d been sucker punched, and then she was breathing hard, collecting her things, while Rake fingerprinted, marked up the blood on the wall with cryptic designs, a pentagram (sometimes) and a cross (most of the time), and even his name (every time), writing into the furrowed carpet around the men’s legs and then cursing because spreading blood pooled over it.
Get me a fucking towel, he said, and she came and he swabbed the blood, pulling up the carpet and the padding to give him room, and then he smoothed it down quickly and made more designs while she filled the duffel and got the rucksack.
Go as deep into the strangeness of it and leave clear-cut indicators and be certain that what was left behind each time was a record. That was his modus operandi.
Anyone passing on the road, looking carefully, would’ve noticed a crime in progress. They would’ve seen the heels of the two dead men on the walkway, in front of the shabby hotel. They would’ve seen Rake doing a little dance, leaving bloody footprints all the way to the office. They might’ve seen — if they passed a moment later — Rake shooting the night clerk. The bright flash.
PSYCH CORPS BUILDING, FLINT
Singleton and Klein had gone over the map that morning, the long strings and the short strings: red ones marking a murder, blues a possible sighting. The target, Rake, was on a rampage, or had been on a rampage, and he had gone and taken a girl named Meg. One more Grid-breaker going in and taking a girl out of post-treatment, Klein had explained over and over for at least a week.
Now Klein leaned forward with his hands flat on the desk, arching his neck to look up at Singleton.
“You know what I did before I joined this outfit?”
“No, sir.”
Light coming in from the windows — the smoky morning air taking the sun and diffusing it — or the fluorescent fixture overhead talking to itself. The world buzzed in Singleton’s ear.
“I fought in the big one and then I became a historian. You can’t fight in that war — I mean really fight, be in the shit, so to speak, and not become some kind of historian. Let me tell you, history misses the point. Take the Somme, for example. The Big Fuck-up. I mean it was called that when it was happening. You had something like sixty thousand lads — and they were lads — die in the first day of battle. That battle cut the world in two. It introduced pure irony into the world, but do historians mention it? Hell no. Are we willing to call Nam the Little Fuck-up? Christ no. The president keeps her rolling and decides to make a repository for irony, and do you know where it is, Singleton? You’re sitting in it. And I feel duty bound to dissipate some of the excess irony. And do you know how I’m going to do it? I’m gonna terminate this Rake character first chance I get. Now, you might think that’s against the Credo, but the way I see it, he’s going around taking perfectly cured individuals and returning them to their traumatized states, and when we tried to enfold him, to treat him, he became one more in a line of failed enfolds, and the only way to make the wider problem — with the treatment, I mean — disappear, the only realistic way is to terminate him. If you’re gonna build a big repository for the remnants of Nam, if you’re gonna go around believing in the structure of your endeavor, you have to be willing to go out and solve the problem so it doesn’t exist anymore — proof of the problem, I mean. So that’s why I’m going to eliminate him.”
Klein moved back to the map on the wall, touched the pins, plucked the strings gently. “That’s just between the two of us, confidential,” he said. His voice softened and his jaw slackened for a second and then tightened up. He’d be lighting a pipe in a few minutes.
“I don’t really want to go against the regulations,” Klein said. “Or the mission, for that matter. But the way I see it, a situational reality must be faced. We’ve been tracking down these failed enfolds for two years now, and we have cops up north sending the law enforcement liaison down asking for help. They’re sure we know more than we say we know, of course. I’m here to train you, so I feel an obligation to speak the truth. But you should feel an obligation — no, scratch that. You’ve taken an oath to keep this case to yourself. Anything I say in here can be used against you, so to speak. It would’ve saved me a hell of a lot of time and pain if I’d been trained to see that we’re not a perfect organization. The vision we have as an organization, even our building might seem close to perfect, and certainly we’ve come a long way toward fulfilling our mission, but, again, truth to power, there are points at which the means of war, the problem itself, must be tapped to solve a difficult problem. A man like Rake escapes off into a fury of social nonstructure. He comes to us, his file sealed, as per regulations, and then when we try to enfold him, to give him the best treatment possible — although I’ll be the first to admit that he was one of the early test cases, and his reenactment was down in New Mexico — he doubles his trauma, and as I’m sure you know, from reading your manuals and your early training, a failed enfold simply takes the Causal Events Package and amplifies it. Tripizoid, in the case of a failed enfold, doesn’t allow for the proper state of redress. It’s just a drug, and like all drugs it’s still partly — no, scratch that — it’s still a mystery. You’d know about drugs, I assume. You could tell me plenty.”
Singleton looked over Klein’s shoulder and out the window and thought about the agent Wendy, who was probably, right now, listening and nodding and making gestures to indicate she was listening. He thought of her up in Relations, hands in her lap, her eyes fixed on her boss. Meanwhile, the building gave off bad vibes that came of its having been endowed by Kennedy in his third term, when secured by his martyrdom (or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it), as part of his Great Hope initiative. Originally built to serve as a transfer point for veterans coming back into the Vetdock programs, the offices consisted of shoddy government-issue wallboard in preconstructed frames, with flickering fluorescent lights and broad windows facing the front of the building. A sense of mission gone haywire inherent in the walls.